(Truthstream Media.com) Homeland Security Advisor: In Massachusetts… every Patriot’s Day and Fourth of July is treated as a ‘disaster.’ “I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.” — John D. Rockefeller

(Truthstream Media.com)

If the first bomb hadn’t gone off right next to the finish line, emergency response might have been a lot slower. As it were, officials were conducting a large scale terrorist exercise right across the finish line with participation from a slew of federal, state and city agencies.

This was first exposed through a local news report with testimony from a concerned track coach who witnessed bomb sniffing dogs near the end of the 26.2 mile race, spotters on the roof and warnings from officials that it was ‘just a drill.’ This became more compelling when ‘contractors’ were spotted working in teams near the bomb site, then afterwards reporting the scene over communications gear and meeting with the FBI bomb squad.

Now, evidence revealed in a series of photographs taken both before and after the blast clearly reveal that an exercise of some kind was underway during the Marathon.

BOSTON’S EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT OPERATING AT MARATHON

In 2011, and again in 2012, Boston ran a major scale terrorism exercise with participation from multiple agencies dubbed Operation “Urban Shield.” In it, special police, SWAT units, EMTs and fire fighters worked with FEMA, Homeland Security and Boston emergency managers to practice locking down the scene, stopping terror suspects and treating simulated wounded victims.

The latter are actors who participated in this 24-hour drill and were dressed in realistic blood and given convincing wounds. As one photo reveals, they also had amputees playing the part of victims, as an EMT practiced cutting off the circulation to a bleeding limb.

One of the major participants in this Boston drill is Rene Fielding, director of the City of Boston’s Office of Emergency Management. Her job is to mitigate terror and disaster risks by coordinating with a variety of integrated agencies. She speaks in this 2012 video:

The Atlantic, reacting to the Marathon bombing, wrote a story about how Boston is one of the best prepared cities to deal with terrorism. They note the role of Rene Fielding in getting the city accredited in a program that shares power with the feds:

The Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP) further encourages a convergence of local and state planning strategies. Established in 2003 under the guidance of DHS and FEMA, EMAP is the country’s first accreditation program for all-hazards plans — the first comparative body that holds all municipal, state, and university emergency plans to a common, respective standard. In November, under the leadership of Rene Fielding, director of the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, Boston became one of only four cities nationwide to receive EMAP accreditation. [emphasis added]

A person believed to be Fielding also appears on-scene during the aftermath of the Marathon bombing. Showing up within about two minutes of the bombing, while talking on the phone, this individual appears to give direction while reacting angrily to her conversation. This woman’s concern about the actual victims seems minimal compared with her intense focus on the phone conversation.

Did the exercise go according to her expectations? Were any of her participants affected by the bombing? What was really going on behind the scenes at the Boston Marathon?

One thing that is clear from the photo evidence is that immediately after the bombing there were relatively few people among the huddled group of injured, or those with them. By the time the woman believed to be a city emergency manager arrives, a huge crowd of responders, emergency exercise participants and onlookers had gathered around the injured people. It seemed that many civilians, rather than trained EMTs and fire fighters, who regularly save lives, were tending to the wounded.

There are now multiple overlapping pieces of information that confirm the fact that Homeland Security and other emergency managers were coordinating a “planned disaster” exercise during the Boston Marathon, as they have admittedly been doing annually for many years to practice contingencies for terrorist attacks, natural disaster or other scenarios.

Writer Lucas Bowser pinpointed public statements from Arnold Bogis, of George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute, on the on-going emergency operations at the Boston Marathon, as Bogis makes clear in his 2008 op-ed, ‘Marathon as dry-run disaster.’

“Today thousands of runners and hundreds of thousands of spectators are unwittingly taking part in a planned disaster …“Massachusetts is better prepared for a real disaster because every Patriot’s Day and Fourth of July is treated as a ‘disaster.’” [emphasis added]

The power point includes plans to help the media ‘get the right story,’ suggestive of the selective footage networks like CNN, MSNBC and FOX have chosen to show their audience during various major events.

Collaboration: Working With the Media“Their mission is to get a story. Building a long relationship with journalists and reporters ensures that they get the right story and that they serve as a resource when needed.” [emphasis added]

According to the plan’s presentation, medical tents are set up along the route to deal with patients suffering from common issues like dehydration and exhaustion, but also fully equipped to deal with disasters. It further notes that the medical tent also prepares for mass-casualty incidents, biohazards and weapons of mass destruction: “WMD CST and BFD partnered with for HazMat / MCI decontamination.”

Response was coordinated due to EMS ‘mass casualty’ drill

This year’s exercise included field trials of a new tablet device that medical workers can use to log data on patients in the crowd in real time. Notably, it was referred to as a “Mass-Casualty” device in the headline of the original press release [archived], but later changed, oddly stating that it was not a mass-casualty device:

Boston to Deploy Mass-Casualty Tablet Device During MarathonThe platform, from SafetyPAD, is intended for use in mass-casualty situations gives EMS personnel the ability to carry into crowds and assess a patient upon arrival, document in realtime, transmit data to transport units before they arrive, and other features. [emphasis added]

The editor’s note claiming that this tablet device was not involved in mass-casualty planning, despite the previous report, is ludicrous considering that the “planned disaster” scenario specifically notes a high-tech patient tracking system that was evaluated during these special events (p. 31). Registered runners, FEMA notes, are preregistered in the system, while ‘unique barcodes’ are assigned to patients and tracked through a web-based system.

Within five minutes, victims with traumatic blast injuries began pouring in, Davis said. The tent, which spanned an entire city block, was set up near the finish line to deal primarily with typical running injuries. In an instant, it was transformed into a mass casualty center.[emphasis added]

Witnesses report that bloody spectators are being carried to the medical tent that had been set up to care for fatigued runners. Police wove through competitors as they ran back toward the course. NBC’s Brian Williams says Boston EMS workers are dealing with “mass casualties”.[emphasis added]

SO WHAT? A MULTI-AGENCY TERRORISM DRILL WAS UNDERWAY…

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

FEMA stands for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It’s FEMA’s job to respond to emergencies, and prepare for contingencies for whatever might happen. It just makes sense, right?

Nobody wants to be attacked by terrorists or have their homes destroyed by weather disasters. That much is obvious. But the simple fact is that Homeland Security can’t actually stop terrorism. They cannot keep the public safe, at any price.

Just after the Marathon bombings, Tom Ridge, former director of Homeland Security flatly admitted as much to CBS News:

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge says the absence of intelligence might suggest the attacker is not affiliated with a larger terrorist group: “It may lead to the fact that this was not connected to a major jihadist organization. This might very well may have been a domestic terrorist or lone wolf, as you might want to describe it.”

[...]

Ridge says the reality is it’s impossible to guarantee security at every public event.

The Boston Marathon was a complex event. It was a public gathering of hundreds of thousands of spectators. Thousands of runners were participating in a sporting event that spanned over a 26-mile path through a major metropolitan area. On top of that, all the layers of counter-terrorism, law enforcement and security met at the Boston Marathon to conduct a live mass casualty drill and terrorism scenariowargame drill. On top of that, an actual attack took place at the event, killing three and wounding more than 170.

There have been many examples of emergency exercises coinciding with real terror events, but few are as stark what happened in the subways during the London 7/7 bombings. Peter Power, an advisor for Visor consultants, acknowledged that he was running a drill that matched almost exactly the actual events. He suddenly had ‘to switch from fictional to real,’ he said in an interview.

Did something quite similar occur at the marathon? By all appearances, there were many players in this government exercise near the scene of the bomb in Boston, as numerous figures behave peculiarly in the aftermath (as demonstrated in the photos above).

YOU BREAK IT, YOU BUY IT

What if you want something that’s not for sale? Something really valuable… like the power to name your own price, the power to have people do your bidding or simply the power to change the rules.

For government agencies, its a drive for power that is frustratingly limited by the official rules, particularly for the federal government which is bound by the Constitution. Getting around that is difficult, and generally only possible through emergency powers – over stuff like attacks, invasions, disasters and other special crises that seemingly trump normal jurisdiction.

A history of the 20th Century, through its major world wars, and throughout its large cultural shifts, has been undeniably woven by unseen, manmade forces. Intrigue, corruption and conspiracy are the price of admission into the play for power politics.

“I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.”— John D. Rockefeller

Sneaky, dirty tricks are the cards that members of secret societies and intelligence networks are dealt by inheritance, indoctrination and initiation; and those are the cards they play, sowing the seeds of media smear jobs, war provocations, assassinations, coups, infiltrations, false flag attacks, patsy frame ups and much more. The consequences are astounding. The partial record we have of the CIA’s actions during the second half of the 20th Century, where the Cold War was fought by propaganda and covert means, is testimony to a laundry list of entire nations wrecked, entire wars sold on lies, repeated sabotage and entire peoples duped by false leaders and hidden agendas.

While it is clear some kind of drill took place here, it is not clear who played what role, or who, if anyone, was “in the know.” Nevertheless, it reveals information that the story was not as straightforward as we were told.

Drill participants hold a stake in the intelligence structure and Continuity of Agenda (COG) program. While the vast majority of emergency workers have honest and often valiant stakes in the system — namely the lives of people in their community and the paychecks that sustain their families — all are placed under the broad umbrella of Homeland Security.

This is critical to understand. The powers given to the mega-agency at the federal level give it coordination and supervisory powers over more than a dozen intelligence agencies, emergency response, law enforcement, military and civilian life. Through joint exercises, Homeland Security is inviting state and local players to yield to federal disaster control for a shared stake in a huge security-industrial complex.

While medical workers, fire fighters, police, National Guard and other blue collar rescuers put in the hard work, they execute a procedure that has been instituted from top down, re-routing the kind of local support the country is used to seeing into a federal takeover model. Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Katrina, et al.

The larger response by FEMA and Homeland Security during catastrophes, particularly those relating to terrorism, leave open huge areas for covert units and intelligence agencies to play beyond the normal rules tolerated by society. Other players assisting in relief and support roles are in the dark about these actions yet participate in the larger response.

In the end, reports tell us that three people died and more than 170 were wounded. And while these emergency managers may have responded quickly and decisively, their militarized efforts at the event did not stop the explosives from their destruction, but instead likely created an avenue for the real culprits to place their device — under the guise of a mock scenario — though most participating in the exercise had no idea.

Nevertheless, those who joined in Homeland Security’s event to preempt this violence will have to live with the bitter irony that they were in the middle of efforts meant to stop this very thing from happening, yet didn’t.

One person on Twitter, apparently connected to emergency management, commented on a news link: “Nice mention of Rene Fielding, former colleague who’s been helping Boston prepare for a terrorist attack for years…” later adding, “We spent years rehearsing only to be so far away when it happened. Sucks to be so far away.”

This individual, who surely meant to stop such a tragedy from occurring, seems to little realize how rehearsal may have played into black operations to stage a terror attack. Will we ever know for sure?

There are now multiple overlapping pieces of information that confirm the fact that Homeland Security and other emergency managers were coordinating a “planned disaster” exercise during the Boston Marathon, as they have admittedly been doing annually for many years to practice contingencies for terrorist attacks, natural disaster or other scenarios.

Writer Lucas Bowser pinpointed public statements from Arnold Bogis, of George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute, on the on-going emergency operations at the Boston Marathon, as Bogis makes clear in his 2008 op-ed, ‘Marathon as dry-run disaster.’

“Today thousands of runners and hundreds of thousands of spectators are unwittingly taking part in a planned disaster …“Massachusetts is better prepared for a real disaster because every Patriot’s Day and Fourth of July is treated as a ‘disaster.’” [emphasis added]